Today I turned on my laptop and found that my audio was broken. I looked online for a solution and found many people had the same problem as me but there was no real solution. I looked at my laptop, remembered all the OTHER vista/hp related problems there were, and I disconnected my laptop and went back to my good old XP. It has a similar crappy graphics card and works just as well in games. It just has less RAM. My old XP is also 8 years old. Good game Vista. X.x

When in doubt if it's hardware or a software issue, download ubuntu and load from the cd directly (no need to install) and see if it can play sounds. odds are it will play sounds without needing to download drivers, if not you may want to download drivers for linux just for test purposes.

if all fails, system restore, clean the junk out of the mouse and scream bloody microsoft 3 times out loud.

any news on your laptop? maybe i could help